No more teachers, no more books

I liked heroic animal stories — collies that always found their way home, faithful blind horses — and my brothers liked adventure stories.

When I was growing up in west Marin in the late ’50s and early ’60s, in a family of eight (the seventh child came later) living on the earnings of a carpenter who worked only in good weather, we were poor in that way you don’t realize until later, when you meet people who aren’t. My mother’s records for 1959 showed $13 spent on my sister Mickey, and $16 on my twin and me. Summer camp was out, as was milk in school, lessons of any kind, store-bought haircuts, and even bicycles except for junkers from the thrift store.

But a lot of things were free — the dam where we went swimming, the hills we roamed in, the radio programs we listened to, and the little county library down the road.

I didn’t like the library much. You had to be quiet, and there were a lot of rules. But they also had a lot of books. Mrs. Peterson, the librarian, would blanch when she saw the six of us kids race in and start pulling books off the shelves, each attacking a shelf at his or her own height, but she let us do it, and even showed us where the best ones were.

I liked heroic animal stories — collies that always found their way home, faithful blind horses — and my brothers liked adventure stories. Mother, for some reason, liked stories about women who had lots of kids, no money and wildly unpredictable husbands.

We could take out as many as we liked, but first mother had to pay our fines, five cents a day for every late book. It takes a while for a book to make its way through a family of eight, especially if it detours through the washing machine or gets trapped under the couch cushions.

Mother herself got so she could stir a pot of oatmeal with one hand and hold a book in the other. I’d watch my sister Mickey in the sagging swing, reading one Nancy Drew after the other as if they were chocolates in a box, and it was clear she was someplace else, even though I could still see her there, hogging the swing.

That was the thing about all those free books. You were lifted right out of your own life as completely as if a balloon had come along, with a grayhaired librarian beckoning you aboard.

In that balloon you could be rich or poor, swallowed in the belly of a whale, or raised in the jungle by apes, or spend two years before the mast in a whaling ship. Though you faintly heard the dog barking or smelled the pork chops your mother was cooking or felt the California sun burning your neck, you were somewhere else, living what others had done and said, in other places, other times — living them so completely that it became obvious to you, a working-class child living in San Geronimo Valley in 1959, that anything was possible.

One rainy Saturday we piled into the Rambler and drove down to the library to swap our jam-smeared, overdue books for fresh ones. A storm was forecast for that weekend, and we had no TV, so for mother it was get the books or try later to reconstruct the house from memory.

On this day, though, there was a sign on the door: “Library Closed Until Monday.”

We rattled the door and peered through the windows. There were the books, only a few feet away but out of our reach.

It was a long, long weekend. Mother made do with an old copy of Life, Sean tried to dismantle the brother he had been supplied with after so many girls, the rest of us took turns saddling the dog and asking what there was to do.

Closing a library, any library, seems like a step in the wrong direction. But we were all right. We knew that come rain or shine; our library would reopen on Monday.

This column originally appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle April 23, 1991.